by Alexei Sayle
‘That’s right.’
‘I do remember her,’ said Laurence wistfully. ‘Terrific little actress, wouldn’t sleep with me, she kept laughing on stage. Was that it? Was that why she left?’
‘No. She forgot her lines and made some other ones up. In Liverpool.’
‘Right. Ah, they go mad in so many ways: suddenly think they can’t act, get panic attacks, develop obsessions with their thumbs … and she was killed in a car crash?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you want to sponsor some shows of mine? Anonymously?’
‘Yes, anonymously. Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve recently made a lot of money, have always been interested in the arts and you’re the only actor I know. I read in the paper that you want to get back touring and thought I might be able to finance your tour. I mean since you set fire to the Arts Council headquarters there’s not going to be any government—’
‘Well, I’d signed a seven-year contract with NBC at the time, didn’t think I was coming back to this stinking country. I didn’t know they deported you from the States for low ratings.’
‘Here’s the thing,’ I said, aware that I’d suddenly started talking like a character in a David Mamet play, ‘here’s the thing. What I want you to do is not put on one of your own plays, though obviously they’re all great obviously. What I want you to do is this, to think of the most amazing play you ever saw in your life, the play that really changed you: I want you to stage that.’
As soon as I got back from the bar with more drinks Laurence Djaboff, who’d been deep in thought for many minutes, said, ‘I know what it is!’
‘Yes?’ I enquired eagerly, sitting forward in my armchair. ‘I doubt you will ever have heard of it, an early Howard Brenton play by the name of Christie in Love. Now you’re too young to be aware but there was a time in the late sixties and early seventies when playwrights ruled the earth. Oh, it was the very heaven to be in the theatre then. Arnold Wesker had his own shop where you could buy all manner of Arnold Wesker products, and his chain of Chips with Everything restaurants. Snoo Wilson had four chart-topping number ones and was on a special Christmas Top of the Pops presented by Harold Pinter that was only eight minutes long and spoken in an entirely made-up language.’
I was pretty sure Laurence was making up all this stuff about the playwrights. We’d done Chips with Everything at school for A level English and nobody had mentioned the playwright owning a string of restaurants. Still, I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
‘Now, it just happens at the moment to be the fashion in the theatre to revive plays from that period. Audiences watch them now in a completely different way, of course, for their strangeness. I imagine a lot of theatre-goers find early Dusty Hughes as difficult to understand as Chaucer. Okay now, this Howard Brenton play, I remember I went to see it at the Incendiary-Device Theatre that used to be in Regent Street that only operated at lunchtimes; you could take your sandwiches in and eat them while you watched a play. Anyway, everything Howard Brenton has written before and since is complete shit but somehow in that one play, Christie in Love …’
Up until this point I had been sitting with a ridiculously dressed, mildly drunk little man, but as Laurence Djaboff began to describe the play, in some way he contrived to paint that autumn evening in late 1969 so vividly that it hung in the wine-stained, shout-filled air in front of my leather armchair.
‘It was performed in the round like a lot of stuff was then, the set was wonderfully simple, a sort of pen about three metres by two and about a metre high made out of chicken wire full almost to the brim with torn-up and twisted shreds of newspapers. A claustrophobic atmosphere, very little space between the audience and the chicken wire, just enough room for the actors to walk around.
‘As the public filed in with the house lights still on there was already a policeman digging with his spade into the newspaper like he was turning over a garden; before the play began he’d covered every inch of the pen. On the crappy old sound system over and over a tape broadcast details of Christie’s life and of the women he had murdered. I’d bought a Dutch buckwheat pancake from a food cooperative to eat and as I bit into it the policeman looked straight at me, the house lights snapped off and he started to recite these filthy limericks: sickening they were. You see what the set represented was the garden of 10 Rillington Place where Christie had murdered and buried all these women and I remember at one point — it was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen — Christie suddenly rose on a wire out of all the newspaper and he was wearing this horrible crude paper-mâché mask; it seemed impossible for anybody to be under all that paper, the policeman had walked and dug over every inch of it. It was the most extraordinary piece of pure theatre.
‘It turned my head over, that play, because in its own way it was revolutionary; revolutionary for the time because part of the point of it was how terrible it was to be a copper, to encounter such awfulness and this was at a time when authority figures, coppers, soldiers, civil servants, were hated and despised by anyone on the left; we couldn’t see them as human, we couldn’t imagine that they had any feelings.’
‘Laurence,’ I said, ‘that sounds exactly what I want.’
‘We’ll play small arts centres,’ said Laurence, now in full flow, ‘maybe the odd derelict warehouse — that’s very fashionable.’
‘Oh, I can help you out there,’ I said enthusiastically, then paused. ‘There’s only one other thing.’
‘What is it?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘No, nothing to worry about. Only when the play gets to the north, when I come to see it there’ll be a man sitting next to me in the audience. I want you to direct the whole play at him.’
A few hours later after many more drinks the whole thing was planned. I would provide twenty thousand pounds: this would buy me a tour of provincial arts centres and a possible London premiere at a theatre pub. My money would pay for a big van that the cast of three and two technicians and the set that the cast would put up would travel in. Laurence was going both to direct and star as the older policeman, the inspector. All in all it was a pretty good deal; that sort of money would only buy you shutting down Bury town centre for a fortnight at most.
My intention had been to take the afternoon train back to. Liverpool from Euston but the evening found me still at the drinking club. At some point Laurence said to me, ‘Old man, do you think you could lend me three hundred pounds?’
‘Sure,’ I said, drunkenly fumbling for my wallet (developers always carried plenty of cash). ‘I didn’t think you were so hard up that—’
‘No, no!’ protested Laurence. ‘It’s just I need the cash right now. I’ve had a few drinks and when I’ve had a few drinks that often makes me want to go and …’ He paused.
Here we go, I thought, coke, prostitutes, boys, girls. Here’s the problem.
‘Makes me want … makes me want to go and buy a yo-yo.’
‘A yo-yo?’ I squawked.
‘Yes, a yo-yo. I’m a big collector of yo-yos. There’s a lot more to yo-yos than you think; you think they’re just a fucking toy but you’re a cunt if you think that. I bet you don’t know this but the yo-yo was once a mighty weapon. A sort of oriental boomerang, a skilled hunter could bring down a flying bat with a well-aimed yo-yo. Then there were the bigger spiked war yo-yos of the Tang and Ming dynasty …’
So after a trip on two buses and the Docklands Light Railway, I found myself in a council flat in a place called Mudchute where an old man was unwrapping a selection of bejewelled and gold-plated yo-yos while a Chinese woman served us glass after glass of clear oriental spirit.
‘I think you’ll like this one, Mr D,’ the old man said. ‘Only silver plated but the string is pure silk with a lovely balanced action.’ And a little while later as we walked through a council estate a couple of teenagers tried to mug us but Laurence knocked them both out with the yo-yo that he’d bought.
7
She pulled me through the bushes, leaves
and branches slapping me in the face and getting in my mouth till we came out on the other side; now we were on the pavement of the A road that ran alongside the cirKuss campsite.
‘See,’ she said, pointing to a grey speed camera which was sited right by where we had emerged. Then she said, ‘Watch this,’ and quick as a squirrel climbed on to the top of the camera and squatted there, folding her limbs over in impossible ways and making herself very small. ‘Get back in the bushes,’ she hissed, so I retreated into the foliage, crouched under a laurel bush and watched and waited. A couple of cars sped past driving slightly over the limit but not quite fast enough to trigger the camera, then finally an old Montego appeared puffing along the road obviously sticking exactly to the 40 miles an hour limit. As soon as the car passed her Florence took out the two disposable pocket cameras that she’d bought in the petrol station earlier and one after the other let them off as the car passed, so that there was a double flash exactly as if the speed camera had been tripped. Florence quickly pocketed the cameras and slid sinuously down the pole of the speed trap as the Montego fishtailed to a stop in a cloud of tyre smoke, and as the driver, a fat man in his fifties, came running back to the camera she slithered alongside me in the humid undergrowth and lay there racked with silent laughter.
‘What the fuck are you talking about,’ the driver shouted at the one-eyed metal troll that squatted by the roadside. ‘I was fucking doing forty! That’s the fucking limit, I was doing the fucking limit. What did you take my fucking picture for?’
Lying there laughing and laughing, I slid my hand down the back of Florence’s jeans, slipped my fingers inside her pants and began stroking her between her legs. We got up and ran back, crouching low through the bushes, to her van. On the couch quickly she undid her jeans and I pulled them off, then I turned Florence over and slid myself into her from behind.
This time as I came my orgasm was accompanied by the sound of an old Montego reversing into a traffic camera at high speed.
Later, inside the van, we lay in her bed as thin autumn rain drifted on to the roof. Though my body was relaxed and spent, my mind was working late at the office; the problem was that I longed to know more about her. It made me uneasy that I still possessed only the faintest idea of the things in her past that had formed her and she rarely added to the scanty pile of information I held. It was only in moments of complete satiation such as this when her muscles slackened into my softer flesh and her breath stirred the few hairs on my chest that I was able to ask her carefully crafted pre-prepared questions designed to elicit precious biographical details.
Casually I queried, ‘Florence, do you, you know, think people can change?’
Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I do, definitely.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh sure. You know I think it is one of the most amazing things about humans that there always seem to be some person, somewhere, who wants to do every single job that needs doing. Don’t you think it amazing that there are always more or less enough men and women who really, really want to be undertakers, or cleaners of suicides off railway tracks, or bicycle messengers, or technicians who shove little TV cameras up old people’s bottoms in the hospitals?’
‘Right, I guess …’ I said. ‘So?’
‘Okay. So you know those dolls they sell to the tourists in Russia?’
‘Yes.’
‘My country is like that, a country inside another country inside another country which is inside yet another country. This make everybody want to fight with everybody. So civil war breaks out once communists go and quick as porridge many people are ready and willing to consider a mid-life change of career, really happy to change. They suddenly eager not to be teachers or greengrocers or small farmers or technicians who shove little TV cameras up old people’s bottoms any more but they want to be torturers, rapists, black marketeers, DJs who call for genocide over the radio, snipers hidden in the rubble and waiting patiently for days until the right little girl comes along to get water from the one standpipe; they turn out to be really good at it. And there even seem to be just exactly the right number of people who are eager to offer themselves as victims of the torturers and the snipers and the rapists by making defiant stand in the market place or sending their little girl to get water from the one standpipe or hiding people of the wrong religion in their lofts. So people can change, definitely yes.’
I felt awestruck to be in her presence like I imagined somebody might be on meeting Gandhi, though I doubted if their feelings of awe would be mixed with a desire to flip Gandhi on to his stomach and take him again right there and then, as mine were. That she could have been a victim of such things and still remain so lovely was amazing to me.
Then she said, ‘I had a husband once … I think he died. But, darling, I cannot talk any more about it right now. When the time is right, then I tell.’
Leaving her truck in the early morning, a low mist lapped at my ankles as I searched for the key to unlock my bike; sensing a presence behind me I turned and saw Valery standing hunched in the lee of one of the wagons, his jacket wet with dew, staring hard at me. ‘Don’t marry her, you will be killed,’ he called to me softly. I fumbled with the lock, jumped on my bike and rode away. ‘You will be killed,’ I heard again.
Laurence Djaboff had told me the quickest he could have the play Christie in Love ready to’ begin its national tour would be a couple of months. Until it was ready I had plenty of time to introduce Sidney Maxton-Brown to the concept of empathy to give him an inkling of how another human being felt.
And yet despite using a great deal of my energy I had no success at all in getting him to read books, attend concerts or go to art exhibitions; even if I said Florence was coming along he remained remarkably stubborn and simply refused to go. The one thing he would do was watch films with me, so in the end I devised a curriculum of movies that I thought might go some way to elevating a person. Once or twice a week I got him to come round t6 my house to watch movies. Many nights Sidney and me and Florence would sit in front of the plasma screen watching Broadcast News, the entire canon of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, Almodóvar’s Live Flesh but none of his other films, ET, the original Rollerball, Peter Yates’s Breaking Away, Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, Paul Verhoven’s Robocop and Starship Troopers, the complete works of Eisenstein, Buñuel and Billy Wilder.
Sidney certainly enjoyed himself immensely but I didn’t really sense that these masterpieces of the cinema were causing any noticeable increase in his empathy. There was, though, something else that did really seem to be unsettling him and that was friendship itself. Sidney told me after he’d sat blithely smiling through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem that the day before he’d informed the many members of his family to universal astonishment that he had a friend and that he went places with his friend. He said they couldn’t see the sense in it.
Having a friend didn’t seem to make him happy either. He took to phoning me six or seven times a day to ask anxiously what I was doing and did I know what Florence might be doing, and he was constantly demanding guidance on how he should behave in front of people: what sort of a fork should you eat avocados with? Was it bad manners to take an Alsatian dog to a wedding? Should you tip a rabbi?
The police still kept a close watch over Sidney: a couple of crackheads who grabbed the money he’d just taken out of an ATM machine in the town centre were astonished that four officers were on them before they had got five feet, but by and large he seemed to have got used to it.
One night early in November I slept over in Florence’s truck.
The next morning when I got back to my house there was a message from Paula on the answerphone. ‘Kelvin,’ I heard her say in a tight voice, ‘can you come round? I need to talk to you urgently.’
Oh fuck, I thought.
‘It’s Adam,’ she said as I seated myself in her living room.
‘I guessed as much. He never set up that direct debit you know.’
‘Yes, yes. I’ll g
et you the fucking money,’ she retorted impatiently.
‘I wasn’t saying…’I gave up. ‘So what’s wrong? Where is he?’
‘He’s upstairs. God, it’s been awful. He’s been doing like an enormous amount of cocaine and now he’s become convinced that the fridge in the kitchen is trying to kill him.’
I couldn’t help laughing at this. ‘The fridge?’
‘It’s not funny, Kelvin.’
‘Sorry, nerves.’
‘Okay, I know it sounds stupid. People think coke’s harmless but it can give you terrible paranoia. There’s a lad in the next street who cut one hand off because he thought it was trying to take money out of his bank account. Adam’s been cutting himself as well.’
‘Cutting himself?’
‘Slashing his arms with kitchen knives, burning his skin with cigarettes, all the fun of the fucking fair. He’ll kill himself if he doesn’t get help right away. The GP’s been round and tranquillised him for about ten hours. Reason I called you, see, I’ve spoken to this addicts’ treatment centre down south, a place called Muddy Farm. They say that they can take him in right away, it’s only …’
‘What?’
‘It’s three grand a week …’
‘Jeez…’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Well, I guess I can pay that. I mean they’ll cure him, right?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they will, I mean that’s what it’s there for. These people know what they’re doing and I promise I’ll pay you back.’
‘Don’t worry, if it gets him better …’
‘The other thing: can you, could you, drive us down there now?’
I felt a shiver of fear. I said, ‘I haven’t driven since the accident.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ask you but I don’t know anybody else or I …’
‘Yeah, all right.’ I didn’t think it was true that she didn’t know anybody else who could help her, at least with the driving part. I sensed even in the middle of her misery that it was a part of my punishment that she gave me these tasks. I actually felt no guilt, knew I wasn’t obliged to help her but I did anyway. It came to me that I might as well use this opportunity as a way to get back in a car. I said, ‘I think I’ll be okay to do it.’